[Libguestfs] alternatives for hooking dlopen() without LD_LIBRARY_PATH or LD_AUDIT?

[Richard W.M. Jones]

On Fri, Feb 21, 2020 at 01:19:34PM +0100, Florian Weimer wrote:
> I think what confuses me is that keep talking about a single binary, but
> clearly there is this separate vddk DSO, and there is talk of plugins.
> So it seems to me that multiple files are involved already?

nbdkit is a standalone binary that happens to be able to load plugins
from a well-known path, eg nbdkit-vddk-plugin.so.  nbdkit knows the
path for plugins, and there's a wrapper allowing it to get local
plugins even when it's still in the build directory.  Adding another
file would mean another path (or overloading the meaning of the plugin
path) and just makes the whole thing more fragile and complex.

Having said all that, what would also solve this is either an API for
updating LD_LIBRARY_PATH after the program has started; or making
setenv ("LD_LIBRARY_PATH",...) DTRT*; or some kind of dlopen() variant
which takes a library path as an extra parameter.

Rich.

* “Why does setenv ("LD_LIBRARY_PATH") not work?” has several
stackoverflow answers.  Apparently even the JDK has to work around
this by re-execing.
https://www.google.com/search?q=setenv+%22LD_LIBRARY_PATH%22+site:stackoverflow.com

-- 
Richard Jones, Virtualization Group, Red Hat http://people.redhat.com/~rjones
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